Power line communication (PLC) systems have been in use for several decades, attempting to bring greater bandwidth and services to users, to compete with other communications technologies. Broadband over power lines (BPL) is the use of PLC technology to provide broadband Internet access through ordinary power lines. Development of BPL technologies, in the sense of delivering broadband communication across a power line network, has been a field where significant progress has been made, however, the race is still on to find efficient and effective ways to deliver a multitude of additional services to users.
One of the popular areas under development these days are services and applications that can be used to help manage and maintain electric grids run by Utilities. In response to the above trends, typically, PLC technologies have provided systems that include a plurality of communications modems, which are used to communicate in order to form a communications network. These modems are in general setup to facilitate communications, and in some cases may be updated using hardware and/or software to modify their features and possibilities to operate. Obviously, with networks growing in size it becomes increasingly unfeasible to make such changes to the modems, therefore typically, PLC networks are fairly closed to change until next generation modems are provided.
There is a great need for a power line management system and method that could facilitate intelligent network management, for example, to provide advanced services to users of communications modems.